Robots, Royals and Wrong 'Uns

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello, buglers, and welcome to the final full bugle of the year 2020, spoiler alert for.

I am Andy, Spoiler Alert Zoltzmann, and this is issue 4320, Spoiler Alert 6, of the Spoiler Alert Bugle.

There's no surprises anymore.

Audio newspaper for a visual spoiler alert world.

I'm here in London, a funny old place in the northwest of Europe.

If you've not been here, it's very much like a tennis match.

It's got its good points and its bad points.

And it doesn't make a lot of sense if it's your first experience of it.

And there's a very stark difference between winners and losers.

Today, appropriate enough, I'm joined by two zero-time Wimbledon champions.

Firstly, from the former Tennisian hotbed of Australia, it's Alice Fraser.

Alice, welcome back to the Bugle.

Happy Christmas in advance.

Trigger warning.

Happy Christmas.

I'm delighted to be back, Andy.

Thank you for having me.

And from Dublin, where tennis fears to tread.

It's Neil Delamere.

Hello.

Andy, I was meant to be on last week, and then you said that you had somebody else on.

So I didn't catch yes.

Was there anybody big or anybody?

Anybody of import or anything like that?

Somebody from tennis?

Probably Andre Agassi or somebody, was it?

It was Andrew.

It was Andre Agassi.

Yeah.

Good, good, sorry.

Well, give him my best.

The long-awaited reunion.

Happy Christmas to you as well, Neil.

Happy Christmas to you, Andrew.

Those are empty words, to be honest.

For the first time in my life, I went to Prime Minister's Questions on Wednesday.

To finally give answers for what you've been doing up to now?

As a spectator for

a five-live BBC review of PMQs, and it's the first time I've ever been been to it.

Did the umpires tell you to shh if you clap too hard?

It's only half an hour long.

You know, what's the point of anything that lost?

Doesn't even have a meal break in it.

I don't understand.

That is what I always say about sex.

Family show, Alice.

Christmas.

Christmas.

Now I think of what meal.

Meal, family show.

They spent a lot of time

wishing each other happy Christmas.

And you splice it all together.

I reckon it was a good out of

about a 35, 40 minute session, I reckon at least five minutes were spent wishing happy Christmas to each other.

Clearly, none of them actually meant it.

And it could have been just done with one person doing it at the top and then just saying, well, let's assume that everyone's on board with the vague happy Christmas.

And, you know, in those four, those wasted three and a half minutes.

They could have easily solved everything about British healthcare, transport, education, pensions, but they were too busy with these points.

It just shows why we're doomed as a species for me.

Unless you've stopped shooting each other, thrown a football in between two trenches and played a football match.

That level of stopping hostilities, I mean, it's very much second place, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Unless someone's crawled under barbed wire while you're saying happy Christmas to take down a machine gun nest i'm not interested

yeah i would have been so bad during that game because i'm terrible at bearing grudges um but that all that means is that i forgive someone and then i remember some time later at an indeterminate date that i'm still really angry with them and then i turn around and like

i'm really busy

I mean, that is what happened in 1914 when you think about it.

And actually, it also makes you think, you know, there was a controversial goal that probably should have been given offside that was crucial in that game.

And had that correct decision been made, maybe peace would have broken out permanently then for the rest of time.

But I guess that's the thing.

You don't have VAR, you get these controversies.

Anyway,

we are recording.

We are recording.

On the 20th of December, just 2024 years ago now, this very second, a young Middle Eastern woman called Mary was saying, oh, my back.

And her special friend Joseph was replying, replying, I'm still finding this whole thing a bit of a mind f ⁇ TBH.

TBH.

TBH.

In 2019, the United States Space Force on the 20th of December became the first new branch of the US Armed Forces since 1947.

That's, of course, excluding the secret 1980s U.S.

Bounce Force, which planned to use soldiers on a range of bouncing devices, space hoppers, pogo sticks, portable trampolines, rapid assembly diving boards to give their ground forces a key element of unpredictability in modern ground warfare.

Early exercises, however, resulted in the crack specially selected troops just mucking about, bouncing around and having fun, and the bouncy castles in which they were caught had proved to be vulnerable to enemy agents wearing stiletto heels.

Since 2019, the US Space Force has been involved in zero battles with aliens, disappointingly, raising questions about whether the money spent could have been better used if diverted to, for example, the US Subterranean Force, which will fight off any giant worm invaders from the center of the Earth, or perhaps a scheme to fit all firearms in the US with a 30-minute 30-minute delay between pulling the trigger and the gun actually firing, just to give everyone a bit of calming down and/or running for cover time, while still preserving those precious Second Amendment rights with which the founding daddies wanted to permanentify the sacred American privilege of being gunned down whilst innocently going about your daily business.

Anyway, that was 2019, or they could spend that money on putting Marjorie Taylor Green in an absorbing ball soaking she can

more on Christmas later on.

As always, the section of the bugle is going straight in the bin.

This week, we conclude our conspiracy theories advent calendar, which has sparked Chris's huge debate online after we revealed the conspiracy that chickens are a vegetable.

This has

caused a lot of very angry people to dispute our scientific research, I think.

Andy's satire is lost when you condense it down to 60 seconds.

That's all I'll say.

There's genuinely food trading standards are being amended as a result of this.

It wasn't satire, it was like

the stock cube of satire.

Our final three, because I think we've got up to the 21st of December, so your final conspiracy theory is in your advent calendar.

For the 22nd of December, the conspiracy theory is that England's decisive goal in the 1966 World Cup final that bounced down off the crossbar and clearly, maybe possibly over the line to put England 3-2 up in extra time, was only awarded because of a FIFA conspiracy to let England win in order to inculcate an assumption of superiority on the football pitch that would foster a complacency in English football that would prevent the England men's team ever winning another tournament.

And the evidence for this is that England has never won another tournament.

I think that's a conspiracy theory.

That's Article 1 of the Irish Constitution, Anti,

which in itself is a conspiracy theory, Neil.

The 23rd of December, your conspiracy theory is that a day is actually only 20 hours long, not 24.

It should be split into four five-hour segments.

But big business sneaked in four extra hours so they could make people work two hours more a day whilst telling them, look, you've got two hours extra off a day.

The nature of the human mind is that people focus on the extra time off and they end up working a higher proportion of their working time.

Don't get me started on weeks.

They're an absolute f ⁇ ing fiction.

And the evidence for this is that 24 is a really f ⁇ ing weird number to settle on for the length of anything.

And finally,

your...

Says a man who's never had a period.

Yet, Alice?

Your conspiracy theory for the 24th of December is that it wasn't the British that set fire to the White House in 1814.

It was the Americans attempting to harness the power of lightning to reanimate the corpse of George Washington.

And the evidence for this...

is that we're British.

We play fair at all times.

It's not our MO burning stuff to the ground.

We love freedom, we love democracy, and we love the rule of law, and that's just the end of it.

So, those are your conspiracy theories.

That section in the bin.

Wow, Andy, wow.

Well, I mean, there's streak, it's speaking truth to power, and then there's just shouting bullshit into the void, isn't there?

Well, those are very much two sides of the same potato.

Top story this week.

Well,

the robot takeover continues apace.

There's been a lot going on that has really made me extremely concerned that actually 2024 could go down in history as the final year before robots fully take over from humanity.

And the most clear evidence for this is that the United States has been under attack from mysterious robot drones that have been massing off the coast of America

and

will surely take over.

I think essentially what is happening is that these drones that have been spotted, and the first one was on the 8th of December, a police officer gazing out to sea from the shoreline of New Jersey saw 50 drones, quotes, the size of cars flying in strange patterns

over the ocean.

And I mean, this surely is the

beginning of the end, isn't it?

I mean, this is what we all feared.

Well, it's certainly what everyone seems to have feared in that there's like wild hysteria about these drones that the government is reassuring everybody are not a big deal, or they were always there in the first place, or they're probably your drones, and you're flying them now, you just haven't noticed.

Joe Biden came out and addressed this hysteria, said there's nothing nefarious going on.

And if it's not enough to be reassured by a benevolent patriarch like Biden, I don't know what else you're looking for.

He wouldn't lie to you.

He couldn't lie to you.

He just spent months proving during the presidential race that he can barely remember the end of the sentence he's saying.

The Democrats couldn't even get together a good enough conspiracy to pretend the president was composed mentors during heavily choreographed camera appearances.

This is not the good old days of conspiracy where nobody knew Teddy Roosevelt was in a wheelchair or that President Taft was only a front half with no back of his head or

bottom at all.

You can't get away with it anymore.

There's no conspiracy.

It's just a lot of people with drones.

What any conspiracy would I do is I try and figure out who's really funding it, you know?

So, like, RFK Jr.

wants to take the fluoride out of the water supply.

So, where is he getting his money from?

Turkey.

That's where he's getting his money from.

It's got to be.

Erdogan is ringing and going, it's awful stuff.

Do you know what also causes cancer?

Floss.

Floss.

Toothbrushes.

Mouthwashes being mined using child labour in Congo.

You're using conflict listerine, Robert.

Conflict listerine.

So I can't figure this one out, though.

Because Joe Biden, as you've said, has reassured the public that there's nothing untoward going on.

Like, I don't know if a member of the public bringing their concerns to Joe Biden would be listened to.

Hey, when I look out, I just see bright lights or spots in my field of vision.

Do you know what that feels like, Mr.

President?

I'm 82.

Yes, I do know what that feels like.

It's called glaucoma in my situation.

People are just

looking for things.

But basically, we want to read things into normal things because at some level, we want to witness something extraordinary.

Like, are we alone in the universe?

Is one of the three basic questions that we've had for millennia.

Are we alone alone in the universe?

What happens when we die?

Who let the dogs out?

So

people are seeing UFOs or drones where they're not there.

Everybody wants a drone now.

My 12-year-old nephew asked for a drone for his birthday, and he is 11 going on 12.

So I got him the cheapest drone I could get, which is kind of limited altitude.

It goes side to side, up and down.

And he would call it a kite.

paper drone is what we're terming it in our house acoustic drone acoustic drone he's like how high does it go i was like how long is a piece of string so

i just think they shouldn't be asking the democrats because they're in that sort of weird liminal space of they're about to lose power and so no one's taking them seriously anyway uh but who they should really ask is elon musk because i'm sure he'll have a great take on the drones well it's quite possible that it's i don't know that he's got some sort of fleet of great big flying robot testicles with which he intends to impregnate the entire entirety of North America.

We just don't know with Musk.

We just don't know.

If he's not too bored with buying the entire concept of democracy and communication, then, yeah, we wouldn't put anything past him.

I mean, obviously, there's a lot of concern that this is signs of an alien invasion that could derail Donald Trump's planned rebrand of

the United States to Trump Lania or the Margaret Atwood-inspired ciliad or even Big D's demonic deathscape.

But

I guess we'll see that play out over the next

one to four years.

But as you say, the not particularly outgoing President Joe Biden, who will always be known as the filling in the world's most cantankerous sandwich, tried to reassure his threatful nation that this was nothing nefarious.

The problem with saying it's nothing nefarious is that he's saying this to America, where everything is either actually nefarious or perceivable as nefarious if nefarious aucity is what you want to see.

Interestingly, the etymology of nefarious is quite interesting.

Nefarious was the evilly scheming half-Roman, half-Egyptian pharaoh god, an alleged love child of Queen Neferbubi and the famously gluttonous emperor Augustus Glupus.

There is a Christmas fact.

Well, this is the, yeah, you're so right, Andy.

Everything in America is either nefarious or it's not nefarious and being used to launder nefariousness.

Oh, that's wholesome.

I wonder what horrible tax the loophole that's filling in.

Equally obviously, this is just the start of a real-life disaster movie that's going to end with Channing Tatum wrestling and erupting T-Rex whilst the LA Dodgers sign a 30-metre-long alien serpent to a $4.2 trillion, 120-year contract to play shortstop.

We've seen this so many times before.

There's speculation about what's causing these drones, but the obvious explanation is that people are f ⁇ ing with people.

Like a thing that people have done since the dawn of people.

Arguably f ⁇ ing with people is how we got people people in the first place.

Whether you believe in the Adam and Eve version where she was

with a snake, or that at one point there was someone objectively too smart to be having sex with a monkey, who was having sex with a monkey.

Anyway,

I don't buy your Elon Musk theory either because anytime I hear anything about Elon Musk being the cleverest man in the world or the richest man in the world, I just think your mother couldn't spell Noel.

That's all that is.

And if you want a Christmas joke, no one is worried about.

And of course, you know, this time of year, weird things happen.

I mean, again, 2024 years ago, people saw similar sightings.

And, you know, if you believe the medieval and Renaissance paintings, what happened then was that aliens and UFOs sent a baby-sized 45-year-old balding white man to save humanity.

So

we just don't know.

Stacey Pettigohn, the director of the Defense Programme at the Center for a New American Security, which sounds

that sounds like something from a disaster movie that's going to go horribly wrong.

Stacey Pettitjohn suspects that most of the large drones are, in fact,

small airplanes and that publicly available flight tracking data backs up this.

But this is exactly what they want you to think.

But is that such an obvious explanation?

But it can only be bullshit.

That's, you know, in 2024, that, that you know, just simple evidence and data can never be trusted.

Um, the FBI has rather wokely told Americans not to attempt to shoot down the drones.

What are they trying to hide?

They might as well have come straight out and said, please do not shoot down the UFOs.

They're jam-packed full of slimy green things from a distant galaxy, and we're seriously hoping they'll conquer the planet on the 18th of January.

But you've got to love that.

What sort of a country is it when you have to tell the populace to not use your own weapons to shoot down the drones?

Because in in Ireland or in Australia or in England, that'll be don't go outside and just look at the drones.

That's bad for you.

Because that's all any of us are going to do.

To play devil's advocate on this, they did say, please don't fire lasers into the sky as well.

Because what happened, what happened, I can't believe I'm saying it.

Because what happens is a lot of these drones are actually

manned aircraft and you will get into the pilot size.

But I think that that...

Okay, I think it's like the monkeys and the typewriters.

With enough monkeys, enough typewriters, they will eventually write write the work of William Shakespeare, right?

So we believe this.

This is a bugle staple, I seem to remember.

So with enough people shining enough lasers.

Neil, just to pick up on that, we did actually discover after experimentation that they're actually much more likely to write an episode of Neighbours than the complete works of Shakespeare.

Okay.

The principle.

More likely, but you're not ruling it out.

The probability isn't zero.

Okay, right.

So eventually, if someone shines enough lasers in enough pilots' eyes, there will be a pilot who is just about to go for corrective eye surgery.

And then

and he saved himself a few quids so you know it's not worth the risk neil it's not worth the risk it's a massive danger of sky cats you put enough lasers in the sky and they are going to evolve to chase those lasers

i'm jewish obviously it's well known that we run jewish space lasers um and

you know we this time of year christmas is an awkward time of year for us brings back a lot of very difficult memories to process And if we're not allowed to use our Jewish space lasers to run the world, then what have we got left?

Are all lasers Jewish?

I don't think so, actually.

Well, no lasers have four skins.

Well, yeah.

I've never seen a laser eat a bacon sandwich.

You can read into that whatever you want.

And when you were a kid, like, and you're going,

no, I actually can't do that joke.

You can do the joke, but I'm kind of thinking a headcome.

No, no, no, I actually want to know.

In more promising news from the robot takeover, robots are dying off.

Alice, you have been charting the inevitable decline of humanity at the hands of our robot overlords

since the very dawn of time.

I mean, this is quite a promising story.

An AI robot called Moxie,

which was sold as a toy, is being shut down.

The company that made him is shutting down, and the robots are going to stop working.

Moxie, of course, named after the celebrity antibiotic drug, Moxie Plot System, which treats bacterial infections.

It's proved

hugely popular.

But

this could be the break.

Is this the start of the fight back, Alice?

Well, so, Andy, this is a far more tragic story than you're giving it credit for being.

This is embodied, the ominously named maker of the charmingly named Moxie.

They specifically designed this robot to be a robot friend for autistic children,

to be like, help them learn social skills.

It's shutting down due to what they're calling a sudden absence of funds.

The robots are going to stop working when the company closes.

That's the specific date the robots are going to stop working.

So there's basically a death clock on these poor robot friends and parents have the option of explaining to their children that Moxie is terminally ill or they can just say nothing and pretend to be surprised when it wakes up dead one day.

You know what autistic children famously love, Andy?

Sudden change and loss of routine.

The problem is things aren't built to last anymore.

You used to buy a thing and then you'd have that thing until you died.

If it broke, you could fix it.

Now everything is deliberately designed with one of either built-in obsolescence, cost-cut, sweatshop, factory, tacky breakability, or ravenously and shittified subscription service that continually downgrades the quality of the product until you're willing to pay a platinum premium upsizing fee just to get the basic service you would have taken for granted when you first signed up.

That is the Bugles business model, Alice.

Well, that was a race.

Who's going to get to that first?

I eagerly anticipate a subscription service for oxygen or for my phone to try and sell me the opportunity to connect with my own children ad-free.

The worst thing is, these robots are so cute looking.

They're like a pixar idea of what a cute robot would look like.

They've got bright colours and expressive eyes.

And unless you've got access to a ventriloquist and a neutra bullet, your kid is in for a rude awakening.

It's like watching the teletubbies get myximitosis.

It's really dream.

That episode was never broadcast, though, I think, was it?

No, but it's a cracking sequel to Watership Down.

Watership Down was the prequel to White House Down, interestingly.

Then it was Rabbit Proof Fence.

Everything is linked.

Unorthodox chess move news now.

Prince to H6.

It's not your average chess move, but we've seen it in the United Kingdom.

Prince Andrew to a Chinese businessman, Yang Tengbo, who is known, apparently in his spy life by the British Secret Services as H6.

He emphatically denies being a spy, which I guess reveals that he's either a spy or not a spy.

Or something

in between.

It's an interesting story.

Yang Tang Bo last year year was banned from coming to the UK.

No tickets to the World Snooker Championships at the Crucible for him.

Nor indeed the chance to come to my tour show, which continues in January.

Details at Andyzoltzman.co.uk.

He's not coming because he's not allowed in the country.

So, what makes Yang's case a bit different?

Because obviously, a cheeky bit of spying, a little paddle in the old commercial espionage pool, that's par for the course.

What makes Yang's case a bit different is that he is accused of using his relationship with a member of the British royal family to acquire intel to squirrel back to Beijing.

Now,

I've already already told you who that member of the royal family is, but if you can forget that, I'm going to give you a quiz to see if you can guess who it is.

Multiple choice.

Was it A,

Princess Anne, the former president of the Save the Children organization, patron of multiple charities, and Nobel Peace Prize nominee?

Or was it B,

friend of American sex traffickers Jeffrey Epstein and Gillade Maxwell, alleged sex criminal, friend of assorted despots, gun smugglers, and premium grade schisters, and 25-time National Embarrassment of the Year, Prince Andrew?

Did he let show jumping?

Can I just ask that before I answer my question?

Because if he, if hitchlicks like show jumping, I got to go for Princess Anne.

Yeah, at this point, I almost admire Prince Andrew.

Do you know that?

I almost admire him.

A lot of people would have had one big scandal in their life and would have gone, that's me.

I'm going to rest my laurels now.

He could have taken the big money move to Saudi Arabia, Andy.

He didn't.

He didn't.

He went, I think I've got one more big scandal in me.

I think if I put my head down and if I really work through it, I can completely make a bollocks of something else.

I really feel I have

one more big win in me.

So, yeah, he's alleged to have hung around with an alleged spy called H6.

Now, H6, actually, you're wrong there.

He's called H6 because that was the piece of information leaked to him that allowed the Chinese to sink one of your battleships.

That's why he was called that.

Massively, how does he not think that this is massively damaging to his reputation to be seen hanging around with Prince Andrew?

So now he is in the situation with Prince Andrew where he, and this is kind of so sad in many ways, he's not allowed to go to the royal family Christmas due where they all go to Sandrakim and then he's not even allowed to go to Buckingham Palace.

So he's just going to be sitting at home, sad in his own with Fergie.

I just had this image of him pulling a cracker and he's not even let wear the hat because it's a crown and that's just a step too far.

He's going to have to rehabilitate himself on possibly some sort of game show.

Reality TV is actually where people rehabilitate themselves.

So I think Dancing on Ice would have been a perfect, you know, he has so much in common with Philip Schofield, but he's he's resigned from that.

So maybe I'm a Sax Cobb gothic get me out of here.

I think that could be good.

But I reckon

it's Strictly, isn't it?

He's going to be on Strictly in two years.

That's what it's going to...

It's just...

Oh, Prince Andrew, you're, Jesus, you're fitter than I thought you were.

Look, two minutes of salsa dancing and not a bead of perspiration from your body.

What a superstar.

Your salsa is amazing.

It's almost like you spent time on a Caribbean island.

Is there anything you'd like to talk about?

I just, I mean, this is such a terrible, a terrible thing.

The Chinese government has asked the UK to stop causing trouble by drawing attention to this incident of Yang Tengbo making friends with Prince Andrew.

Basically,

he's alleged to have formed what's called an unusual degree of trust with Prince Andrew and trying to leverage that connection to help China.

And to be fair, that is what traditionally in China has been called how you do politics in China.

Asked for comment, a senior member of the CCP said, what do you mean you're not sending in hundreds of official assets to acquire power and influence in the new nation with no explicit instructions or pay, just a deeply seated certainty that we can observe them from afar and call them in at will.

You're not doing that.

What the f?

Who the f ⁇ have we been jailing without trial for the last 50 years then?

The Brits, Andy, I assume you thought it was unfair because you were expecting them to come and hit you with an opium war.

Is that how it works?

Well, I mean, yeah, I mean,

the Chinese embassy telling the UK to stop creating trouble.

I mean, that's advice that Britain has not always been excessively keen to take on board, as China itself would know, as you hint from, for example, the First Opium War and its somewhat derivative and formulae X equal, aren't they all, the Second Opium War, in which Britain attempted in the mid-19th century to establish itself as the world's most influential drug dealer, because we are, as I mentioned, a nation of strong morals and upstanding principles.

There's a great line in one of the documents that says, you know, from one of Andrew's advisors to H6 that said, apart from his internal advisors, you're high up on you're top of the tree that a lot of people would want to be on.

And I think he's confusing a tree with a crucifix, because nobody wants to be on that particular tree.

Also, do we really think that his internal advisors are particularly good advisors?

No, go on, you snice.

Go on, you say what you want to say, my friend.

What's the worst that could happen?

A spokesman for China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said these rather glorious words: China has always acted in an upright and honest manner and has never engaged in any deception or interference.

So it is not worthwhile to refute this kind of groundless speculation.

Fair enough.

You've got to take them at their word.

They have, after all, never engaged in any deception or interference.

So, fair call.

Nigel Farage being covered in milkshake news now.

And Nigel Farage has reacted with, well, extreme disappointment to

the sentence of an OnlyFans model who threw a milkshake at him during a general election campaign.

She was only given a suspended

prison sentence, and Farage,

not happy with this.

I know both of you are huge fans of milkshake generally, philosophically,

as a concept and as a means of political protest.

I usually use it as a means of collecting some boys in my yard.

Well, that's the main reason she couldn't go to prison.

Like, where could she exercise?

Surely her milkshake would bring all the boys to that yard, and that would be an absolute disaster.

This story is so weird.

She was leaving McDonald's, and he was leaving a pub with the worst name in the world.

Now, just this is a sidebar here, Andy, right?

Irish pubs name that to people's surnames.

I can handle that.

McDonough's, Kyo's, that sort of stuff.

Stop, English people, stop naming pubs after after two random things put together.

Stop it now.

Are you coming for a drink?

Oh, oh, I'm in the dog and duck.

Oh, I'll meet you in the bachelor and stethoscope.

Oh, yeah, I'll listen.

You'll have a quick one there and then head on to the otter and hysterectomy.

Stop doing it.

Stop doing that.

He was walking out of a pub called the Moon and Starfish.

Moon and Starfish is an awful name for a pub.

It sounds like an action, and then what you see as a result of that action.

Do not call stopping moon and starfish.

So she throws a milkshake over him.

You could be the best dry cleaner in the world.

You are not getting the smell of Nigel Farage out of that jacket.

That's neither here nor there.

Do we know her motives?

So it's immediately assumed that this is a political thing.

Was it, on the other hand, and can we rule this out, the most unorthodox osteoporosis awareness campaign that has ever been attempted?

We don't like, did she shout anything?

Did she shout, your increasingly unhinged rhetoric has stoked fear and division and dehumanized some of the most vulnerable members of society?

Or did she shout, them bones, them bones need calcium?

Like, until we clear that up,

we just don't know.

I would say be culturally sensitive if you're going to throw dairy products at politicians.

That's all I would say.

If you're throwing clotted cream at a Devon politician, please throw it before you throw the jam

and vice versa for someone from Cornwall.

I mean, the sentencing is really the wrist-slappiest slap on the wrist that you could possibly slap a wrist with.

She has to

pay Farage £150 in compensation

and complete £20 hours of unpaid work and pay £450 in court costs.

Farage is understandably upset that what he perceived as a humiliating and frightening assault has not resulted in a prison term, but will instead probably result in a series of politically themed milk-based pornographic photography opportunities for her OnlyFans subscribers.

And also, now he can't be seen to subscribe to her OnlyFans anymore, I assume.

Ferries news now.

And,

well, Neil, this is

quite a big concern for the people of Ireland: that the Holyhead Ferry Port, which takes ferries from Wales to Dublin, has been closed.

due to what I think can be charitably described as a significant structural mishap, and uh, it could mean that a hundred thousand people who are planning to use ferries to travel back to Ireland for Christmas are now having to make alternative uh travel arrangements.

Obviously, Boris Johnson had a dream not so long ago of building a bridge from everywhere in Ireland direct to wherever he happened to be standing at the time with a photographer and a news crew, but sadly, that didn't get off the ground, let alone

over the water.

Uh, so now

there's this problem, and people have been pleading with airlines not to hike up their prices due to the increased increased demand, which to me is a is a is a betrayal of what everything we almost fought the Cold War for.

You know, the right that Ice Cow should exploit people financially.

I mean, has this been a big story in Ireland?

Yeah, it's a massive story here.

The price of flights has shot up in a piece of dynamic pricing that Oasis would call a bit much.

A flight from Stanstead to London now, Stanstead in London to Dublin, one of them is 600 quid.

600 quid to go on a Ryanair flight for an hour.

That's a 10 or a minute.

For a 10 or a minute, I want someone on a phone line talking absolute obscure filth to me.

I'm being really specific.

And then the spread arm of the bagger had to be removed to be calibrated properly.

I'm talking just really weak shit.

Really specific, weird, technical stuff you use to harvest the bog.

Anyway, that's a different thing.

There's a big worry.

I feel like I've revealed too much about my Midlands upbringing there.

There is a very specific thing where there's a worry about Irish people getting home, 100,000 Irish people getting home.

Let me tell you right now, international listeners, to

the bugle.

We will get home.

This is what we do.

There is a famous story where Jack Charlton, so Ireland was playing Italy in the 1994 World Cup in Giant Stadium in a city that probably equal numbers of Italians and equal numbers of Irish people.

They walk out and it's a sea of green.

Jack Charlton looks at Tony Cascarina and goes, Tony Cascarina, you're the only Italian here.

Now,

we

get

home.

It is what we do.

E.T.

was Irish.

That's why he had that catchphrase.

This is what, like, Ireland will play Azerbaijan in a tournament.

If we ever qualify again, it'll be Baku.

You look out, and it'll be majority Irish people, little of Azerbaijan.

We will get home.

People will be hijacking jet skis.

Lads will be prit-sticking themselves to the sides of trawlers.

We'll be be ringing the Royal Navy going, I've just seen the Russian battleship.

Where is it?

Oh, it's easier if I show you.

Yes, it is right beside my house.

Why do you think I was so concerned?

And there'll be lads on, if

a fellow doesn't ride home in a whale, I will frankly be disappointed.

There are lads standing on piers in Wales with like a bridle in one hand and making whale song noises like from the posh spa.

We will get home.

Have no fear of of that.

Now, in the new year, I think there's going to be a freight issue, but you'll be home with your loved ones for Christmas.

It's what we do.

I mean, Chris, obviously, you have Irish heritage, and you know, it can be pretty difficult to get to Ireland at the best of times if, for example, you try to get through passport control with a child's passport.

Who says I don't look like my baby child?

And for the record, Neil is exactly right because I then then did travel the many hours back to London, get my passport and was in Dublin in time for our live show.

So

not a bad thing.

Did you have a driver's license with you?

No.

You can travel between the two with a driver's license.

No,

I just had the face of a baby in a book.

As you say, it is very important to state that this was...

Chris's child's passport, not a random child's passport.

As far as they were concerned, that didn't matter, actually.

Well, it was how you tried to pass it off saying you'd had a rough week.

Time really catches up, Project.

The stress was over here.

Bugle Light is really tough.

They didn't even offer me any milk or pat my back.

Neil, I just think you are so right.

The Irish people will not put up with this.

I think we are leading inevitably towards the thing that we all foresee coming, which is a fairy heist.

Yeah, that's right, boys.

Put on your adult shorts with the pleats up front.

We're getting the transport heist gang back together.

I just see there's piracy on the high seas.

There's a bomb specialist not doing anything because we don't want to blow up the boat.

But like,

that's all I see.

And there are options, as you mentioned,

riding a whale.

I mean, one of the options, 100,000 people affected, just everyone club together, work as a team.

Everyone brings a piece of wood approximately one meter long plus a tire or a balloon or something that will float, and you build a pontoon bridge across the Irish Sea.

A thousand passengers a metre each.

That's about a hundred kilometers that will get you there or thereabouts or near enough to swim the last bit.

Alternatively, club together and set up your own airline with prices fixed rather than fluctuating according to the twattish whims of supply and demand.

Or hijack a pedalo from a holiday camp, or just get a boat the other way around the world, which will take longer, but probably be more reliable.

Food and drink news now.

And

well, Neil, this is a story that

I think has had the world in a state of greater conniption than anything else,

maybe in the last, I don't know, well, 2,000 years since we're going back that far quite a lot on this episode.

That pubs have had to introduce ration cards for Guinness due to a shortage of Guinness.

Which, and I don't know whether, is this a distribution thing or a manual?

Because I know Guinness is made from the souls of the damned.

Is there just a shortage in that?

Yeah, I mean, that's what it tastes like.

I know that this is essentially treason, but I'm not a massive fan of Guinness.

I'm not a fan of anything that is a combination of gout and soup.

That's what it is.

I mean,

there's a shortage because Gen Z are drinking it, apparently.

Yeah, there's a social media craze.

You split the G, so you drink enough so the pint level goes down and splits the G of the Guinness glass because the Guinness glass has Guinness written on it.

See, Guinness has been brilliant at marketing always.

They've always been unbelievable at this.

Because you have to be.

Because you can't tell people the truth.

You can't go, oh, the next morning, you'll feel horrendous, but on the plus side, you'll think you're defecating charcoal.

You can't do that, so you have to come up with some other stuff.

But there's one way, if you want to tell if some, even if you're not a drinker, if you want to see an Irish person explode,

if you see a bar person and you go, listen, I'll have a pint of Guinness and a Pint of Carlsberg, and they pull the Carlsberg first,

that basically the Good Friday Agreement is over.

You'll see them just rip it up in front of you, and all better off at that point.

But yeah, there's a shortage shortage because there's a new generation of people who are cool and hip and not elderly

Irish folk fans, which used to be the stereotype people who love porter drinking it.

Bugle Christmas section now and we'll finish this year of full bugles.

We will have a sub-episode coming out next week which is a Q ⁇ A with John Oliver that we recorded after the episode last week.

But this is our Bugle Christmas section We're going to start with

the first round in the Bugle worst Christmas ever competition.

I've got three contenders from history and you can decide which you think is the worst.

I think we've already put Nikolai Ceausescu through to the final.

But who is going to meet him there?

So your choices are.

Choice A, from the year 333, the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great elevated his youngest son, Constans, to the rank of Caesar.

He was age 10 at the time.

That is not what you want for Christmas as a 10-year-old.

Here you go, son.

The responsibility to help run a crumbling empire spanning a vast swath of the world.

But I wanted a fing bike and a gladiator costume.

You disappoint me, boy.

Bad Christmas for Constance back in 333.

But probably not as bad as in the year 820.

Eastern Emperor Leo V was murdered by followers of Michael II in Constantinople.

Leo was attending a cheeky little Christmas matting service when a hit squad, disguised as singers in the choir, threw off their robes and revealed themselves as assassins.

Leo tried to defend himself with a cross from the altar.

If only Jesus had been executed on something shaped like a baseball bat or a sledgehammer, he might have had more luck.

But it didn't work.

He still had his arm lopped off and then was hacked to pieces by his communion table.

That, to me, is a bad Christmas.

His chunked up remains were then dumped in the snow and subsequently his four sons were all castrated.

Very bad.

Christmas indeed.

But was it as bad as the Christmas John IV, the Emperor of Nicaea, suffered in 1261 when he was deposed, bad Christmas, on his birthday, worst Christmas, at the age of 11, see above, and on the same day was blinded on the orders of his co-emperor.

That's not what you want from your work, colleague.

Terrible, terrible Christmas prank.

So those are the options for

worst Christmas ever.

We're going to get some Christmas tips now from Neil and Alice to help you have the best possible bugle Christmas that you can have.

Alice, what are your tips for our listeners?

I've got two main tips.

One has sub-tips.

First of all, tis the season of mercy and hope, so please stretch out a thought and a prayer for the plight of the Australian Christmas Santa.

Just a hot, wet man in a synthetic beard and cotton gloves and final boots, just being harassed by children.

The last thing you want when it's that hot is to have some soggy little toddler

begging you for more stuff.

That is my tip number one.

Just practice some compassion there.

If you're dreading culture war chat with your loved ones over the Christmas meal,

try inventing a new culture war out of whole cloth and throwing it on the table with the turkey.

So some examples might be, snowflakes are saying birthdays are sexist now.

Or, did you hear they've discovered a new dinosaur and it's black?

You know,

wasn't enough to present scientific data that the T-Rex was actually too fat to run.

Now have new dinosaurs with effet feathers and velociraptors with the size of chickens.

This contradicts the documentary I watched about the subject with Sam Neal.

Or you could try, illegal boat people are disorienting our fish supply and our mermaids.

Or

my personal favorite, if Die Hard is a Christmas movie, then the story of Cinderella is a Halloween story because it has a pumpkin in it.

I do actually stand by that one because it's like, never mind.

You know,

it has to happen on Halloween because otherwise, how could the fairy godmother pass through the veil and do the magic?

And then you've got the rats that turn into men and then back into it.

So it's all about disguises and like masks.

And then I always felt very existential about the inner life and subjective experience of the temporary mouse footmen.

Like what a horror it would be to suddenly be thrust into sentience and servitude for the length of a ball and then suddenly have your scarcely reconciled humanity stripped from you as the clock strikes midnight, and you're just a mouse once more.

To clarify, this is an argument for Cinderella to be included in the canon of Halloween stories, not for Die Hard to be removed from the canon of Christmas movies.

Try that.

There was a pumpkin in Die Hard as well, but I edited out of the final version.

Genuinely, one of my favourite pieces of acting in Die Hard is how Alan Rickman is playing this very suave and sinister terrorist boss, but when he reads his like hostage statement to the hostages,

he's got a bit of stage fright.

Well that's because he just had a pumpkin removed from his head, but he didn't see that scene.

Neil, what are your Christmas tips?

Well I've taken two two from Alice there obviously.

One is to

be kind to the Christmas Santas in Australia, and then all I heard from the second bit was that there was a possibility of fing mermaids because I just want

Irish people that consider that as an option for getting home when the ferries aren't working.

I

have one tip after Christmas.

It's what I had a moment of realization not long ago.

I realized I'm an odd man.

And this is when I realized it.

So do what I do.

When you go to the bottle bank, wait until there's nobody else around, and do what I do.

I put my arm in all the way up to the shoulder and pretend I'm a vet.

It's just a lovely moment of fantasy.

If you want to take it a bit further, just rub the side of us.

It just brings us back to our agrarian roots and kind of grands you.

Yeah.

I've seen the thing with bottle banks.

It's you know, withdrawals not as good as deposits, generally.

Well, that brings us to the end of this Christmas bugle.

Much to think about from the last couple of months.

Family show.

Very, very philosophical.

Also, my Christmas tip is to buy tickets for my tour show, which, as I said, restarts in January, runs through to those bits and bobs in April and May.

Thank you to everyone who's come so far.

Details at my website, andy'solson.co.co.uk.

Neil, anything to plug?

Yeah, I'm doing a UK and Irish tour.

So I'm doing Leicester Square Theatre and Glee Club and Birmingham and Cardiff and all those places.

So the tickets are on neildelamere.com or the venues.

And I'm at Neildelamere Comedy on Instagram and Facebook and all the rest.

So thanks to the people who've bought tickets already and see you on the road.

Alice.

You can buy my book.

It's called A Passion for Passion.

It's coming out on the 6th of February.

There'll be an event in London on the 5th of February, details to BC.

And then I will be in Leicester on the 7th of February, Bristol on the 9th of February, Brighton on the 11th, Edinburgh on the 14th of February, Valentine's Day, 17th of February in Birmingham, 25th of February in Leeds.

And I'll be doing a show called A Passion for Passion about the book, A Passion for Passion.

So come to the show and buy the book, and it will all be good.

You can buy the book online by going on a website.

Any website, literally, any website.

Yes, well, they have a preferred link.

But I forgot.

Oh, it's bookshop.org.

If you go to uk.bookshop.org and you can buy a passion for passion, apparently that's the place to go to buy it.

Also,

I do a podcast called The Gargle.

It is the sister podcast to the bugle, and you can listen to that.

And also, I'm running, ooh, a creative reboot between the 27th of December and the 7th of January, the gooch of the year.

If you spend that time sort of wafting around, wishing you could be setting up creative habits, you can actually go to patreon.com/slash Alice Fraser and sign up.

It's less than £20 a day to do this creative reboot.

And it's just, you know, challenges and a class and fun and workshops and then a group chat if you want.

And you can kind of participate in as much or as little as you like just to start the year with good habits going on.

That's the creative reboot, patreon.com slash Alice Fraser.

That's all my stuff.

Big between Christmas and New Year's.

That's not an award.

Yeah, no, the Gooch of the Year between Christmas and my birthday, which is the 7th of January.

I thought it was an award we're giving out.

I thought it was not right.

A bit more competitive than the 80s and early 90s when, of course, Brain Cooch was.

Well,

it's between the moon and starfish.

Right, this show needs to end.

Thank you for listening, Cubelist.

We will have the John Ola QA sub-episode coming out just after Christmas, Chris.

Yes, a week today.

A week today?

Unless you're not listening to this, the day it came out, and then it's roughly the 30th.

It's the most bugle sentence ever.

We will have our review of 2024 coming to you early in January, and then we will be back with full bugles after that.

Until then, thank you for listening, buglers.

Thank you for listening throughout the year, and we will see you in the second quarter of the 21st century.

Hi buglers, it's producer Chris here.

I just wanted to very quickly tell you about my new podcast Mildly Informed, which is in podcast feeds and YouTube right now.

Quite simply, it's a show where me and my friend Richie review literally anything.

So please, come join us wherever you get your podcasts right now.